I've lead a sheltered life and never seen atripinne either in the flesh or
in a color photo. That 1977 Tulane piece had some not so great B&W photos. A
lot of geographic breaks are abrupt and all that. But this discussion
started over a decent quality photo of a fish that could be either duryi or
simoterum from just looking without (me, anyway) knowing location, and
probably will turn out to be neither. Female darters know just fine what
color displays turn them on and who they should probably mate with; I'm not
imbued with that sharp, instantaneous discrimination for high-grade sexual
selection. Oh, well. Like the man said, there's grandeur in this view of
life.

--Bruce "Ulocentra R Us" Stallsmith
near the Tennessee
Huntsville, AL, US of A

>>With all of these Ulocentra the differences revolve around fairly subtle >>differences in pigmentation, especially of the "saddles", and just how >>declivous the snout is.>>"Fairly subtle?!" People who thought that atripinne graded into simoterum >either hadn't seen nuptial males or hadn't looked critically. The >geographic breaks between these taxa are discrete, abrupt, and stunning - >maybe if you're a myopic color-blind human and can't distinguish between >green, black, and orange you might have a problem, but the fish seem to >sort themselves out just fine.>>cheers,>Dave>>-->along the muddy Mississipi, St. Louis, MO

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